Research out of UMass Amherst suggests medication used to stop the spread of cancer may help fight tick-borne illnesses such as Lyme Disease. WAMC's Jim Levulis spoke with Stephen Rich, the executive director of the New England Regional Center of Vector-borne Diseases, about the study and how it relates to existing Lyme treatments.
Rich: Generally that's antibiotic treatments, most often doxycycline. A reasonable course of doxycycline takes care of most early detected Lyme disease cases. There other antibiotics where doxycycline is contraindicated, there are other antibiotics that work as well. Things like amoxicillin, but basically antibiotics.
Levulis: I see. And especially the early detection is key, correct.
The outcomes are always better when it's caught earlier for sure. So the stories of people's long-term consequences, generally that's when it goes undetected and untreated.
So it's noted in this research, that this realization that a therapy that inhibits the growth of cancer cells could treat Lyme disease came from a sort of “aha” moment. How so?
Yeah, so the interesting thing is it was a student’s “aha” moment. A very clever student that was reading up on how Borrelia, how Lyme disease spirochetes make their livelihood, how they metabolize and produce energy. And he noticed that they have dependency on a particular pathway, it's called glycolysis. And that pathway is dependent on lactate dehydrogenase or LDH in the case of Lyme disease spirochetes. And it turns out that certain cancer cells, certain tumor cells are similarly constrained in their metabolic profiles. And people knew that about the cancer cells and use inhibitors of the LDH molecule to treat those tumors. And so this student, very logically thought, perhaps they would work against Lyme disease spirochetes, and the experiments that you're alluding to are just that they are a test in test tubes, basically, of whether the Lyme disease spirochetes, their growth can be limited by those LDH inhibitors. And lo and behold, it does. And I shouldn't mention that student's name is Pat Pearson, who he was a PhD student. He's now Dr. Pat Pearson, and continuing that work and others in our lab.
And you noted there that the inhibitors, they didn't necessarily eliminate the bacteria, the Lyme bacterium. But they do stop it from growing?
Yeah, so when we talk about antimicrobials, or antibiotics, there's basically two categories, one are bacteriostatic. And the other is bactericidal. So bacteriostatic basically means that you don't allow the populations to grow. And it's helpful because it allows the immune system to then step in and do the rest of the job and some antibiotics are bactericidal, in this case, it's bacteriostatic.
So what are the next steps for this research?
The next steps are to see what we observed in a test tube killing Lyme Disease spirochetes, or bacteria in a test tube holds true when we test it in animals. And most likely, that would be laboratory animals and perhaps mice. And if it does, then after continued work there, we would hopefully someday be able to trial in companion animals or people.
And aside from the research, I was just wondering, you know, it was a very wet, warm July in the Northeast, specifically, in Massachusetts. Do those types of conditions impact ticks, the spread of them, anything like that?
If it's too wet and rainy we generally see a reduction in exposure because people are not outside as often. So this particular year, it seemed to be a sweet spot and that the reports were that there were lots of human-biting ticks. So while it seemed like a rainy season, it still seems that people were encountering ticks at a high frequency. We saw a lot of dog ticks this year as well, which hasn't always happened in the past. Rain, unlike mosquitoes, ticks don't have a reliance on for their juvenile stages of living in water, so they're not dependent on water the same way mosquitos are.
